Long before one begins the study of law, you are already enmeshed in a story, more accurately a set of linked stories. You have been told stories and become a part of a storied world by way of your family and your neighbors, and the place (or places) where you grew up. Over all the years you have had stories blasted at you from popular culture. Now, in law school, you are in a place where still more stories are being offered to you.

Becoming a lawyer requires you to come to grips with various stories and
to see how these stories are going to hold up out in the world.

What stories
brought you to law school? What hopes and dreams, what fears, do you find in this
story?

Where did you get this story you are now living? James Carse
notes that "stories have a way of emerging out of nowhere. Rather
than making them up, we seem, instead, to find them; it may even be
more accurate to say they find us." [James Carse, "Exploring Your Personal Myth," in Charles Simpkinson & Anne Simpkinson (eds.), Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power
of Stories to Transform and Heal 223-232, at 224 (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1993)]. In
what sense is the story that brought you to law school, a story emerging
out of nowhere? Or is the story that brought you to law school a story
with a long involved history? Is it a story you know how to
tell? Is it a story, upon being told, would tell us something important
about you?

What kind of
person are you in the story you tell about your own life?

Is there a
connection between the stories we know, tell, and hear, and the meaning
we attribute to our lives? Carse argues that "[w]hen we come
to know the stories of our lives, we come to know the meaning of our
lives as well; stories shape the way we see ourselves." [Id. at 224].
Do you agree that the meaning you give your life is found in the story
of your life? Can you think of any way to get at the various meanings
expressed in and through your life without telling a story? How is
the law school/legal education/becoming a lawyer story a way to give
meaning to life?

Do you see
your law school story as a quest story, a heroic journey story? If you do not see yourself on a heroic quest in
law school, what kind of myth are you living?
If you do not see myth in your life, what does that
tell you about the life you are living? Is it possible that your life is driven or dominated by
a myth of which you are unaware? If you do not see your life as mythic,
or heroic, how do you see yourself? "We are," says Allan
Hutchinson, "never not in a story." Can the same claim be
made for myth? Do you imagine your life being lived beyond or outside
myth?

Telling/Living Our Stories: "When we tell our stories, we want to create a vivid and continuous
dream in the listener's heart and mind. As John Gardner says, this dream
is the aim of all fiction, all stories. As an analyst [a Jungian psychotherapist], therefore, I
look for the language, details, memories, events, and metaphors that
make the analysand's story [that is, the story of the person undergoing counseling] precise and vivid. I watch for the distractions,
defenses, and narrative flaws that break the continuity of the dream.
We all . . . have a unique, compelling, and coherent story to tell.
When psychotherapy works, the patient can tell her or his story with
narrative competence and create a powerful, vivid, and continuous dream
in the analyst's mind." [Excerpted from The Narrative
Impulse: Telling Stories, "The Educated Heart," Donald Williams,
a work-in-progress]

Williams contends that "we create our lives and the world with the stories we hear and tell. In other words, we maintain our world primarily in conversation--inner dialogues, face to face conversations, and a vast series of conversations we carry on through books, newspapers, films, magazines, television interviews, electronic mail, Compuserve forums, and paintings worth a thousand words."

Williams goes on to point out that, "For most of us, the stories we depend upon work like morality plays (Seek this above all; avoid that at your peril. . .), like manuals for adulthood (Here's how to. . .), or like private prayers to soothe and protect us (Now I lay me down to sleep. . .). Well-ordered fictions can be reliable maps and compasses (You are here, there's a road there. . .) and sometimes cosmologies (In the beginning. . .). We could not make death or birth, love or tragedy, human experiences without stories. We would not recognize, experience, or understand the meaning of loyalty, friendship, sacrifice, wonder, grief, or desire without good stories. We will always need new stories and the retelling of old stories."

Williams talks about stories in the context of therapy. This leads us to ask what it would mean to say of a particular story, that it is therapeutic. The word therapeutic is derived from a Greek root meaning to attend, to treat. What are we treating when we read lawyer stories?

Stories are Told and Heard in the Context of Other Stories: "There are many stories being imagined
and enacted, but we can only listen to them and comprehend them within
the vernacular contexts of other stories. Our conversations about these
narratives are themselves located and scripted in deeper stories that
determine their moral force. . . ." [Allan C. Hutchinson,
And Law (or Further Adventures of the Jondo), 36 Buff. L. Rev. 285,
286 (1987)]